Posts Tagged With: obedience

That’s how it is with you. When you’ve done everything you’re told, say this: “We’re just ordinary slaves. All we’ve done is what we were supposed to do.” (17:10)

Yeah, I have been known to do it. That typical male trespass. Yes, I have jumped out of my dinner chair, rushed into the kitchen to do the dishes, only to then expect some sort of praise for my great deed. Of course, my wife does the dishes many times a week, never to fanfare. Of course, the dishes have never been assigned to her, as if we did that sort of thing. So I am not doing any great thing, am I? Yet, how easy it is to go looking for praise.

I think that same attitude is easy to have with God. God, did you see what I just did? Did you see how I obeyed without you even asking? Impressed?

Why do we see obedience as an extra we do for God, not part of the job? I need to change that way of thinking.

Yesterday, Paul seemed to be squarely on the side of the Jewish Christians, one more Jew who saw the Gentiles as an inferior people group and unfit for leadership in the Roman church.

Today, in a piece of literary genius, Paul turns the table completely.

So you have no excuse — anyone, whoever you are, who sit in judgment! When you judge someone else, you condemn yourself, because you, who are behaving as a judge, are doing the same things. (2:1)

Sure, the Jewish Christians would not be practicing idolatry or sexual immorality or robbery of the conventional sorts. They were not literally like the Gentiles. But that is the problem with self-righteousness. It settles for literalism, and congratulates oneself for not doing some specific act of perversion. Yet the Law had become the Jewish Christians’ idol. And their adultery was spiritual not sexual. They were worshipping their own ability to be good, and stealing God’s glory.

Worse yet, these Jewish Christians had narrowly defined “good.” For them, good meant being of Jewish heritage, being among those chosen by God to have the Law, knowing that Law, being able to teach that Law, following the rituals of that Law like circumcision, food laws, and holidays. Good meant being a good Jew. So defined, yes, they were very good, and their Gentile brothers and sisters did not measure up.

Paul sets the Jewish Christians in Rome straight. Good is not defined by hearing the law or having the law, but by doing it (2:13). Paul goes one further: “Jew” — as in the people cherished by God — isn’t nearly as much about ethnicity as obedience. Circumcision isn’t about getting rid of unclean flesh as much as it is about getting rid of an unclean heart (2:28-29). Therefore, an uncircumcised but morally upright Gentile with a tender heart might actually be a better Jew, than someone who can trace their heritage back to Abraham.

If you are a Jewish Christian in this Roman church you have just been put in your place. These chapters might be a rough start to a letter, but we can be assured that Paul had everyone’s attention at this point.

There is just too much “doing” in this chapter for this sermon to be nothing more than pie-in-the-sky idealism.

The word “do” (or “don’t,” “does,” “doesn’t,” “didn’t”) occurs 15 times in this one chapter.

Jesus encourages his audience to “ask,” “seek,” and “knock” (7:7), all very active verbs.

Jesus summarizes all that the Law and Prophets were teaching using the very active Golden Rule: “So whatever you want people to do to you, do just that to them” (7:12).

The calling card of genuine Christians is “the fruit they bear” or “produce” (7:16-19; “produce” is used 5 times in 3 verses).

Clearly, the Kingdom will come into existence by doing. Granted, the Kingdom is not of our doing, as if it is the work of our hands. But we are disregarding the activity in Matthew 7 if we think God will bring His Kingdom while we sit back passively waiting.

"The Wise and Foolish Builders" by Danny Halbohm

Don’t get me wrong. I am no legalist who glories in my good works. People who sit in my classes hopefully will tell you that is not the focus on my teaching. People who know me the best will also tell you I don’t have enough good works to glory in! We don’t “do” in order to get; we “do” because of what we’ve got. But the world needs more than a Church that offers cheap grace that neither changes anything within us nor demands anything from us. This world needs wise builders who hear and do. The skeptical around us need to investigate the vines of our lives and find abundant fruit. They need people who have actually found the gate that leads through the “tight squeeze” (7:14) to the narrow path and have turned around to show others the way.

This is the sort of thing Jesus meant when he said “Follow me!” (4:19)

A rhetorical question (if you wish): who in your life needs you to “do” this Sermon?

There are some chapters that are just daunting to write about; the next three are some of those. What can be said about the Sermon on the Mount that has not already been said and said better or is really worth saying? Like James, these are chapters that will meet us where we are, somewhere different each time we read them. Do share how God speaks to you this time around.

There are many different theories on what exactly Jesus was trying to do in the Sermon on the Mount. Was he, the new Moses, giving a new law on a new mountain? Was he setting out the moral code of the Church? Was he giving the “impossible dream,” a perfectionistic dare that only punctuates how God’s Kingdom is only attainable by the power of God? Or something else?

No doubt the parallels between Moses and Jesus are no accident, but 5:17-20 discount a view of the Sermon that diminishes or reverses the role of the Old Testament law. No doubt the Church has turned the Sermon into its moral code, though we haven’t done so well, have we? Consider how successful Christians are doing with lust, hatred, divorce, and love for our “enemies.” Sayings like the following one do sound like they are “impossible” reminders of our own frailty,

Well then: you must be perfect, just as your heavenly father is perfect. (5:48)

But why does the sermon end with the declaration that we are as “foolish” as a man who builds a house on a sandy seashore if we do not do what has been said in this sermon (7:24-27)?

I would like to advance a different idea, one that is certainly not my own and has been gathered from many different places, none of which I remember off hand. The Sermon on the Mount is a picture of life when you come into the Kingdom and when the Kingdom comes into you. Partly idealistic but also partly practical and doable, this snapshot of Kingdom-life was Jesus’ invitation to a whole new way of life, here and now, a worldview (beliefs and actions) that if accepted would revolutionize the follower and those in his sphere of influence.

The Beatitudes

With this idea in mind, consider the Beatitudes (5:3-10). Eight character traits or positions in life are put forward as “blessed” or fortune or happy — humility, the need to mourn, meekness, longing for divine justice, merciful, purity, peaceableness, and persecution. Most of us would look at this list and say there is little blessing or happiness in most of these. But these are exactly the kinds of people who will find God’s Kingdom to be an answered prayer. These sorts of people will find what our present world’s system cannot or does not afford. These marginalized, downtrodden, and sad people will find this new way of life that Jesus is bringing to be truly blessed. These are the kinds of people who need a new system and they will find it if they will truly follow Jesus. On the other hand, there are others who at the exact same time cannot embrace this way of life as anything other than a curse. As an interpretive key that this is a plausible reading of the Beatitudes, I appeal to the “inclusio” or enveloping structure of the Beatitudes: both the first and last Beatitudes mention the “kingdom of heaven.” In other words, all the falls between is the blessed Kingdom-life.

Old Testament Law and the Kingdom

Or consider what Jesus was doing in the long “you have heard it was said/but I say” section at the end of this chapter (5:21-48). Jesus is not taking on the Old Testament law as 5:17-20 won’t allow it:

Don’t suppose that I come to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn’t come to destroy them; I came to fulfill them! (5:17)

Jesus has come as a restorationist. He is the rabbi who does not wish to start a new religion, rather has come to return God’s people to what they were called to in the beginning. Jesus is not saying to ignore the Old Testament laws not to murder, commit adultery, divorce, swear falsely, reattribute justice fairly, or love your neighbor. Kingdom people respect and keep God’s law (5:19). Instead, Jesus is attacking the reductionistic legalism of the Judaism all around him that settled for the letter of the law and ignored the underlying attitudes that cause sin in the first place. In so doing, he was in fact calling Kingdom-people to a “covenant behavior [that] is far superior to that of the scribes and Pharisees” (5:20). Life in the blessed Kingdom is obedient life, but of a deeper kind than had become the norm in the world — even the religious world — around them.

Go to a group of Gentiles? Eat with them? Even baptize them? No, this is not Peter’s plan, at all.

But it was God’s.

All throughout this chapter God through His Holy Spirit is leading the way:

Long before Peter came along, Cornelius and his household had developed a reverence for God and a life of prayer and giving (10:2)

The messengers from Cornelius’ household were sent by God to Peter, not vice versa (10:5-6, 20)

God brought Peter the vision of the sheet and animals

The Spirit coaxes Peter along: “It’s all right; get up, go down, and go with them. Don’t be prejudiced.” (10:20)

Peter says his change of perspective came because “God showed me I should call nobody ‘common’ or ‘unclean.“” (10:28)

Out of the ordinary pattern we see in Acts, the Holy Spirit fell on the household before they were baptized (10:44-48), which is best understood as God showing proactively that these Gentiles were acceptable and baptism should be extended by a reticent Peter

As one of you said in a recent comment, this book is more about the acts of the Holy Spirit than the “acts of the Apostles.” And yet, it is the acts of the Apostles too, in that they are the vehicles of God’s gospel and grace in a partnership between God and humanity. They have to obey and go. Still, this is God’s mission to rescue a lost world. Like Peter, too often we wouldn’t choose to go where God sends. We wouldn’t reach out to the people He chooses. Leave it to God to broaden our horizons!

May we find the places in life where God has already been working. May we set out to simply play the part that is needed next.